Michael Hainey

When Graydon Carter pulled an intern named Michael Hainey aside at the Spy magazine Christmas party in 1989, the legendary editor had probably had a few. “I think you’re going to be a star,” Mr. Carter said. And then the advice he’d repeat over the years: “Don’t fuck it up.”

Twenty-five at the time, Mr. Hainey knew he’d have to move quickly if he was going to make good on his boss’s intuition, since he also believed—beyond reason or doubt—that he would be dead in a decade.

Such was his inheritance.

“For many years, I just thought, ‘I’m never going to outlive my father,’” Mr. Hainey said last Wednesday, in his low monotone. We were sitting in a diner just east of the Avenue of the Americas, kitty-corner from the GQ offices, where Mr. Hainey serves as deputy editor, less than a week before the publication of his new memoir, After Visiting Friends. The book, out this week, details a 10-year search for the truth surrounding the night his father died at age 35, when Mr. Hainey was 6. “That was the thing that defines me,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll ever be free of that day.”

This book represents Mr. Hainey’s latest creative endeavor; he has previously had poems published in Tin House and exhibited paintings at Thom Browne’s Tribeca store. It also may be his most personal. From the time he was 9 or 10, Mr. Hainey remembers a specter of death hanging over him. He had questions about his father, questions about how he’d died, that had gone not only unanswered but, for years, unasked.

“I had tried to imagine his last night,” Mr. Hainey said. “Did he die alone? It frightened me as a boy that no one was with him.”

A Chicago newspaperman, Bob Hainey was found dead in the street on the city’s Northside on April 24, 1970, struck down by an apparent heart attack or cerebral hemorrhage, depending on which paper’s obituary you read. The author’s uncle, also a journalist, broke the news to the family. But there were other inconsistencies. According to one of the obits, he had passed away “while visiting friends.”

“We all long to go in search of our family secrets,” said Mr. Hainey, whose journey into his family’s past didn’t begin until sometime after he had celebrated his 38th birthday, having avoided the Grim Reaper’s scythe. His thoughts kept returning to those obituaries, which he had read at the library as a high schooler when curiosity finally boiled over. Who were these “friends,” he wondered? Why had they never come forward?

Having followed in his father’s footsteps, Mr. Hainey was a newsman now, and his reporter’s instinct told him something didn’t add up.

After graduating from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Mr. Hainey worked for a time at The Chicago Tribune, one of the papers that had employed his father. But he credits his first experiences in New York, and his time at Spy in particular, with teaching him the real ins and outs of reportage. He counts Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen, Spy’s founding editors, as his earliest mentors, as well as Susan Morrison.

“They really taught me what it meant to be a writer in New York, and at that level of ambition,” Mr. Hainey said.

Ms. Morrison, now at The New Yorker, remembers Mr. Hainey, just off the boat from Chicago, as a kind of Jimmy Stewart character. “Before he had the new-wave hair and important eyeglasses and Thom Browne suits, he was this kid with hay in his hair,” she said. “That made him the perfect candidate to do certain kinds of interactive Spy stories. Stories that in another context would probably be called hazing.”

On one such assignment, Mr. Hainey was tasked with chasing after girls on Amsterdam Avenue to test-drive a variety of actual celebrity pickup lines. “He was terrified,” Ms. Morrison remembered. “I think he actually did pretty well with [Warren] Beatty’s line, which was ‘Make a pass at me.’”

Mr. Hainey's new memoir

Anthony Haden-Guest’s pickup line, on the other hand—“God meant for us to be naked together”—did not go over so well.

“He had, from the beginning, in his understated Midwestern way, a combination of confidence and gameness,” said Kurt Andersen, the Spy co-founder-turned-novelist, “just a kind of willingness to do whatever we asked.”

As deputy editor of GQ, Mr. Hainey has interviewed some of the most iconic cultural figures of our time, from Keith Richards to Clint Eastwood to Bruce Willis, the cover boy of the magazine’s current issue. In his book, though, Mr. Hainey talks about how he still needs to get into character before doing reporting. “By nature I’m a shy person. I get rattled easily,” he said.

Perhaps, but there is something of a rascal under his soft-spoken Midwestern exterior as well. When The Observer first met Mr. Hainey, for example, we had been instructed by the writer Donald Antrim to give him the middle finger, because that was how Mr. Hainey caught Mr. Antrim’s eye at a party two decades back.

During those early days in the city, Mr. Hainey lived in a Quaker-run boarding house on 15th Street, where, in exchange for a bed, a desk, two meals a day and a communal bathroom, he paid a token rent and did chores, like washing dishes and shoveling the sidewalks. “It always seemed to be snowing,” he recalled.

Now Mr. Hainey is a perennial front-rower at fashion weeks the world over, and along with his wife, Brooke Cundiff, an executive at Gilt Groupe, he represents one-half of a New York fashion power couple. Mr. Carter describes him as a loyal regular of his exclusive West Village watering holes, the inns Waverly and Beatrice, so “I see a lot of him through the bottom of a highball glass.” But none of that mattered when Mr. Hainey found himself trolling through Chicago hospitals and morgues, chasing after the ghost of his father. Or when he found himself face-to-face with the men who had worked alongside his dad back in the day, grizzled newspapermen who still played by an old-school code of silence, admitting nothing but betraying everything.

“Guys stick together,” they said.

“I don’t think you have the right to know the truth,” they said.

The stonewalling did not discourage Mr. Hainey, and clues began to materialize. (“I’m not a talker. I’m an observer,” he told us.) The author questioned family members, sought out his father’s high school classmates and even forged signatures in order to get hospital records released. Precious, long-forgotten hospital records. He did not begrudge those who got in his way. He just had to get past them.

“I had to know,” Mr. Hainey said. “What was that story?”

In a sea of self-discovery memoirs, After Visiting Friends stands out for its level of journalistic inquiry. “Too many memoirs are ‘me me me,’” Mr. Hainey lamented.

And while the book may have paternal-thematic ties to Zachary Lazar’s Evening’s Empire and either of David Itzkoff’s efforts, it shares most of its DNA with David Carr’s The Night of the Gun, in which Mr. Carr goes back in time to report on his own life. “The art of reporting” is as important to Mr. Hainey as it was for his father. And in the end, this doggedness is what brings Mr. Hainey to the truth about his dad—and to the fear that this truth may destroy what is left of his family.

Bob Hainey with his two boys.

“It’s one thing to be the truth-seeker,” he writes. “It’s quite another to be the truth-bearer. The delusion destroyer. There’s a reason people don’t like revisionist historians.”

So he sat on his newfound knowledge for well over a year. Guilt crept in, as it had throughout his search, when Mr. Hainey wrestled with his own responsibility to his father’s secrets. “Who do you think you are? I made you,” his father would say in their imaginary conversations.

On one hand, the elder Mr. Hainey ought to be proud of his boy. As the author says in the book, “Everything my father and uncle valued in newspapering—good reporting and editing—in the end, it’s what undid them.”

And yet Mr. Hainey admitted that he had “great feelings of disloyalty” about revealing his father’s secrets. “Even though I was a man in my 40s, I still saw him through the eyes of a 6-year-old,” he said. But he knew what he had to do. “There was a lot of doubt, but I had to tell my mother what I’d found out.”

Just as he had to get into character so as not to “let the barking dogs” of journalism scare him, Mr. Hainey felt these were similar fears that had to be overcome. In fact, when asked what advice he might give to some theoretical future son, or what advice he wished he could have received from his father, he said, “It’s about living your life without fear, going toward what you want.”

And 40-plus years later, he is doing just that. Mr. Hainey is already plotting two follow-up works, including a novel, and is in the process of moving into a new painting studio in the West Village.

With all that, surely Mr. Hainey has lived up to that old Christmas-party prophecy.

Then again, Mr. Carter sounded less than unequivocal in his assessment of Mr. Hainey: “I think Michael has proved himself in a number of fields,” the Vanity Fair boss said. “If I could just get him into a suit that fitted him, he’d really go places.”

Dansen, Strahan and White.

Between Kellan Lutz offering to get naked on stage and Ted Danson thanking Esquire for a wonderful evening, the 2012 GQ Gentlemen’s Ball was a boozy affair. 

Host Michael Strahan held the night together, laughing perhaps a little too loud but delivering just the right amount of charm one might expect from a 6-foot-5 former defensive lineman morning talk show co-host. He was all gap-toothed smiles when talking about his new gig on Live!,with Kelly Ripa.

“Kelly is so fun, so energetic,” Mr Strahan said of his miniature opposite.

Who’s been your favorite guest so far?

“Definitely Shaq ... seeing a seven-foot guy looking like Prince.” (Mr. O’Neil sang When Doves Cry on the show last week.)

The evening was in honor of a handful of gentlemen who have paid service to their country in some way. Willie Geist, a member of GQ’s advisory panel, nominated Corporal Aaron Mankin, victim of a roadside bomb attack while fighting in Iraq. Celebrity Ambassadors consisted of Adam Levine, Kellan Lutz, Shaun White and Ted Danson.

We stayed decidedly off-topic and asked each of them what his childhood ambition was.

“I wanted to play outfield for the Yanks,” said Mr. Geist, who's now straddling two jobs, the Today show and the “more opinionated” Morning Joe.

“This way, I can stay with my old family and get a new family too,” he told The Observer. How quaint.   

Mr. Danson expressed sporting tendencies, telling us he had wanted to be a basketball player before “stumbling” into acting.  

At least Mr. White—who recently had a very public wipe-out, arrested on charges of public intoxication and vandalism at musician Patrick Carney's wedding in Tennessee last month—fulfilled his dreams of becoming a sportsman with a rather successful snowboarding career, but we suppose if you’re signed at the age of 6, you stand a good chance. Describing himself when he was younger as a “crazy kid out of control,” we’re not sure he’s changed all that much.

Mr. Lutz, ambassador for Saving Innocence, a charity raising awareness of the sex trafficking of children, said that while his ambition was to be a chemical engineer, he fell into acting through lack of attention at home. Being one of six siblings, “I always felt like I didn’t have much attention and created attention in a fantasy world.”

With the paparazzi hot on his heels outside, there’s no need to fantasize now.

Anne Heche and James Tupper joined guests at the IAC building as Ms. Heche told The Observer her childhood ambition was to be a waitress, while Mr. Tupper wanted to be ”truck-driving poet.” An interesting pair.

Mr. Levine, Maroon 5 front man and ambassador for the Teen Impact Program at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, was also present, with girlfriend Behati Prinsloo, declaring how he was ”most nervous about cursing tonight, ’cos that’s not something gentlemen do.” We’re sure he made Ms. Prinsloo proud.

Currently starring in American Horror Story, he later explained how “the genre scared the shit out of me … to be totally honest, I wasn’t able to get through an episode … all of the horror movies I’ve ever seen have been a huge fucking mistake.”

After raising over $200,000 for charity, Esquire, er, GQ had much to feel good about.

Justin Timberlake has some jerk friends! (YouTube)

– How's this for a wedding present: Justin Timberlake's buddy, real estate agent Justin Huchel, filmed a bunch of homeless people wishing the best for the actor/singer and his new bride, Jessica Biel. See, it's funny because what could the homeless possibly offer Hollywood royalty except wishes? Not everyone thinks this joke is in good taste, but then they probably haven't seen Biel's wedding dress. (Video after the jump.)

http://youtu.be/DMHcGFmhB_s
– Taylor Swift and Conor Kennedy broke up. It's probably for the best, though we hope it doesn't end up with her writing a song called "Camelot."

– If we were sending out good vibes to a celebrity right now, it would be Diddy, who was in a serious car crash yesterday in L.A. No one was hospitalized, but seriously ... this is why we all take the subway.

– Last night was GQ’s Gentleman's Ball. Starring Adam Levine, Ted Danson and Willie Geist, the three biggest gentlemen in the biz.

Han Lee, of '2 Broke Girls'

Last season, television’s most anodyne evening got a shot of hipness in the form of Sex and the City executive producer Michael Patrick King’s new series, 2 Broke Girls. The CBS comedy about young ladies in Brooklyn was an instant hit, kicking off a season-long discussion about girl-women on TV (viz. Girls, New Girl) and getting hailed as a slice-of-life comedy by those who thought that a permanent war over the sartorial choices of “hipsters” coupled with the protagonists’ burning ambition to open a cupcake shop seemed an apt depiction of life in the big city.

But there was another element to the show—something we hadn’t seen in a while. The Tiffany Network’s new Monday night sitcom was brazenly, shockingly, unapologetically racist.

Among the tokenish cast of minorities called upon to behave in baldly stereotypical ways are restaurant manager Han Lee (Matthew Moy), who comes in for mockery for his apparent asexuality and his utter misunderstanding of American culture. (Are his hilarious mispronunciations an homage to Mickey Rooney’s unforgettable turn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s?) Earl, played by Garrett Morris, is a hep-cat jazz musician of the sort one might encounter if whisked back in time half a century or so, or in the reeaal cool fantasies of a white person who’s never met a black person, while Oleg (Jonathan Kite) is a sexually voracious Ukrainian with a pan-Eastern European accent. “You’re so stinky, my mother in Korea called me and said, ‘What’s that smell?’” Han tells Oleg in a typical moment of sparkling repartee. To which Oleg replies with an unkind evaluation of the boss’s manhood.

It’s almost enough to make you long for the days of NBC’s Must-See TV—or even the springtime debates over Lena Dunham’s Girls—when we all complained that prime time was too white!

When asked about 2 Broke Girls’s use of stereotypes, Mr. King offered up his own homosexuality as a sort of license to offend.

“I’m gay,” the producer said at this year’s Television Critics Association press tour. “I put in gay stereotypes every week! I don’t find it offensive. I find it comic to take everybody down, which is what we are doing.”

Gay male humor has historically been predicated on an irreverent disdain for propriety—which, in this day and age, has apparently come to include the gleeful bashing of ethnic minorities. After all, if you’re gay, you’re a minority too: it’s a rainbow-colored “get out of jail free” card, per Mr. King’s argument, entitling the bearer to say whatever he likes. “What is or isn’t acceptable as funny in 2012 seems to be a very abstract idea,” Mr. King wrote in a recent essay in Entertainment Weekly (not online). He added that the way he knows that his gags about race do not cross the line is that the live audience at 2 Broke Girls tapings laughs.

The argument makes you wonder where exactly the show recruits its live audience. Just because idiotic racial humor has a fan base doesn’t mean it belongs on prime-time television.

Besides which, there’s a difference between laughing because something is funny and laughing because it is shocking or transgresses certain boundaries of taste. Take the new NBC comedy The New Normal, whose title refers to gay male parenting but could also be taken as an allusion to the increasingly racy and race-conscious television landscape. The show’s creator, Ryan Murphy, whose other current network series is the racially diverse, often irreverent Glee, seems to think that bigoted humor is the fabric that knits a family together. In a recent episode, a racist lady-of-a-certain-age played by Ellen Barkin finally comes to accept the gay man (Andrew Rannells) for whom her daughter is acting as a surrogate. They bond over an ethnic joke—something about adopted Chinese babies coming with egg rolls. It’s sort of a heartwarming moment, but not quite. The family that mocks Chinese babies together stays together?

The series’s sole regular minority character is Mr. Rannells’s assistant at his haute TV-production job. She’s a brash, aggressive black woman of the sort that’s been sassing up the small screen forever, or at least since the heyday of Jackée.

Interestingly, the assistant on The New Normal is played by a Real Housewife of Atlanta, NeNe Leakes, meaning that she came to national attention under the watchful eye of Andy Cohen, the Bravo executive. Mr. Cohen, who also happens to be gay, seems to have his own blind spots when it comes to racial humor. A recent leitmotif of his talk show, Watch What Happens, involves the host, lovingly or not, replaying for laughs a local news clip of a heavily accented black woman talking about her house catching on fire. It’s not impossible for ethnic humor to be funny—far from it. But there’s a certain humanity missing from these shows, where the object of humor isn’t other characters but simple stereotypes. And while gay producers certainly didn’t invent narrow-minded humor, they have lately made it their own.

Should we just come right out and call them the Gaycists--those who hold what Lauren Bans of GQ first defined as "the wrongheaded idea that having gay characters gives you carte blanche to cut PC corners elsewhere"? Let’s. A further definition: Out gay men whose knowing, ironic appropriation of racist tropes, and whose self-aware frankness about their own prejudice, sashays right across a line the rest of us have come to respect.

Race and gay culture have always made for an uneasy mix. The black drag queens of Paris is Burning—exiled even from white gay culture—have birthed generations of gay men who’ve picked up the vocal intonations and mannerisms traditionally associated with black women. (Think of Project Runway champion Christian Siriano, for example, or Will & Grace’s Jack in full finger-snapping dudgeon.) For white gay men, a group perpetually exiled from the mainstream, identification with blacks, Hispanics and other minority groups goes hand-in-hand with a sort of mockery that’s as much about the jokester’s outsider status as it is about the target’s. This isn’t new—using the women of Sex and the City as his mouthpiece, Mr. King set an episode of the show in the milieu of black drag queens, with Carrie Bradshaw, known for her love of “ghetto gold,” screeching in faux African-American patois about her drag-ball-style “twirl.” And the camp humor aesthetic, from Paul Lynde through Will & Grace, has always used its practitioners’ outsider status as a pass for universal derision. It’s all in good fun—isn’t it? But the combined airtime given to 2 Broke Girls, The New Normal, the urbane gay couple of Modern Family (who were, admittedly, created by straight people), with their Spanglish-screeching harridan of a sister-in-law, and Andy Cohen’s bickering Atlanta Housewives (whose antics are somehow always more GIF-worthy than those of their white counterparts in other cities) adds up to a troubling conclusion: Now that gay marriage is a reality, any gay man with some disposable income and a sperm sample can become a parent and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is consigned to the history books, affluent white gay men have finally been granted admittance to the majority culture, and as such, they are seizing on a privilege long-beloved of their straight counterparts: trashing minorities!

They laugh at themselves, sure, but with the apparent belief that their flaws are cute. The gay men of The New Normal are gently chided for their affectations, particularly Mr. Rannells’s fastidious dresser—but they hardly come in for the worst of Ms. Barkin’s slurs. Those are reserved for random bystanders, like a black schoolteacher of whom she asks “Hablo English?” Sure, Mr. Murphy’s trademark nihilism means that he mocks just about everyone through her character—but isn’t it all a bit wearying? “It’s very clear that I have great affection for her,” Mr. Murphy told Vogue of Ms. Barkin’s character. “It’s like what I said about the [Christian advocacy group] Million Moms: Watch the show! I get that you feel marginalized and on the outside too! We have more in common than you think!”

Indeed. But despite the fundamental conservatism of much of the entertainment industry, no one’s granting the Million Moms the clout to produce a television show casting themselves as the heroes of their own story. Whatever happened in Mr. Murphy’s past, he’s now the consummate insider, with the social cachet to do whatever he likes in his career or his personal life; that Vogue interview notes that Mr. Murphy and his husband are, like The New Normal’s protagonists, considering having a child through surrogacy. He’s portraying the world the way he sees it—with minorities as window-dressing around gay men. (This seems to be a pattern: On Mr. Murphy’s Glee, Chris Colfer’s gay teen embarks on a lovingly portrayed relationship with a fellow singer, while two Asian students’ relationship gets the derisive nickname “Asian Fusion.”)

Mr. Murphy and some of his colleagues don’t mean any harm. And the shows are far from unwatchable: The New Normal earned a rave review from Slate’s television critic, June Thomas, who happens to be a lesbian. “When the whole of America is listening,” she wrote, “it’s tempting to deny the humor. But I admit it: I laughed.”

Meanwhile, 2 Broke Girls’s ratings success, and the availability of Oleg and Earl one-liners immortalized by YouTube users, indicates that there’s a large constituency who enjoy such ethnic sketches as filtered through Michael Patrick King’s tin ear.

That said, not everyone’s so forgiving of The New Normal and its ilk: Salon’s Willa Paskin wrote that the Ryan Murphy show’s jokes “can be momentarily bracing—this show is going there!—but they’re also unremittingly nasty,” while Asian-American cultural critic Andrew Ti wrote on Grantland that “The pervasive crime of [2 Broke Girls’s] Han Lee really boils down to his infantilized speech patterns, thrown in, I assume, just in case his Asian face didn’t drive the message that He Is Not Like You home enough, and you were starting to think of him as some kind of human being.”

But maybe it’s not just the gays who are taking their seat at the table and ingratiating themselves with a rude blast of ethnocentric realness. Take Mindy Kaling’s new series, The Mindy Project, which debuted Tuesday night, featuring the Office star as an obstetrician. While the Indian-American actress, who is also the series’s creator, doesn’t mine her own background for humor, she tosses stones at a Serbian character (a “war criminal”), Gabourey Sidibe (she’s still a punchline?) and her character’s immigrant patient base (“This office is not an inflatable raft!”). Characters like Ms. Kaling’s on The Mindy Project or the gay couples of Modern Family and The New Normal or the two broke girls may belong to groups that have been underrepresented on television until recently, but if they see any irony in their easy mockery of other marginalized groups, it’s not making it to the screen.

That said, The New Normal shows signs of growth; though its most recent episode has Ms. Leakes’s character talking about how black people are always late, and a deeply unsettling joke about Tiger Woods’s lust for white women, the plot, in which the central couple wonder why they have no black friends, manages to play on the edge and actually say something about privilege, rather than throwing jibes at those who don’t have it.

It may not be normal, but it certainly does feel new.

Screengrab. From left: Andrew Warren, Serena Marron, Peter Brant II, and Nick Gruber.

Friday, opening night at pop-up club Chez André at The Standard, East Village, found teenage dandy Peter Brant II and ex-porn star Nick Gruber, who was apparently taking a night off from writing a book and developing a TV show about his two-year relationship with Calvin Klein, on stage. The duo, joined at the mic by Andrew Warren and model Serena Marron, sang and mumbled their way through a live-band karaoke rendition of "Born to Be Wild." We have the video evidence. Arguably, it is the best version of the song ever performed. Arguably!

Leonardo DiCaprio (Gatsby), Vanity Fair, December 2012

Headline: "YES, LEO'S BACK! Hollywood's Ultimate Bad Boy Goes Back to the Roaring Twenties--and Aims At Oscar"

Editorial Concept: Leo plays with a baby tiger cub, smokes a cigar by a pool, walks through a hedge maze.

Carey Mulligan (Daisy), Vogue, November 2012

Headline: "SECRETS OF EAST EGG: Carey Mulligan as the Woman Who Stole Gatsby's Heart"

Editorial Concept: Done entirely in character, with special attention to the scene with all Gatsby's shirts on the floor.

Tobey Maguire (Nick Carraway), Esquire, November 2012

Headline: "THE TAO OF TOBEY: Hollywood's Hottest Recluse on Fitzgerald, Film, Finding Contentment--and What He's Learned Along the Way"

Editorial Concept: Looking stern on a golf course.

Joel Edgerton (Tom Buchanan), GQ, October 2012

Headline: "TIE ONE ON! The 12 Neckties You Need Now"

Editorial Concept: Mr. Edgerton models a bunch of ties.

Isla Fisher (Myrtle Wilson), Allure, January 2013

Headline: "IT'S ISLA! Mrs. Borat (That's Right!) On Her Big New Role"

Editorial Concept: Best mascaras for your hair color.

A house ad in the May 30 print edition of Politico.

Politico enraged much of the media this morning when it published an article accusing top competitors The New York Times and The Washington Post of biased campaign coverage, favoring President Barack Obama.

To us, it seemed like a shameless beat-sweetener. Signal to the G.O.P. that you think the other guys were unfair, the thinking goes, and then watch the Mitt Romney exclusives roll in.

GQ's Devin Gordon took it even further, concluding that the piece is a "thinly disguised, fundamentally craven argument for Politico's superiority in the world of political coverage." (Especially considering it was penned by Politico's two most prominent editorial employees, executive editor Jim VandeHei and White House correspondent/newsletter writer Mike Allen.)

"Let's call this article for what it was," Mr. Gordon wrote. "It wasn't journalism. It was business."

Looking at it that way, the article does seem of a piece with this Politico house ad that appeared in the Wednesday print edition. Name-checking comScore and Poynter.org, it's obviously targeted at a media-conscious audience, and it boasts that Politico strikes a "perfect balance" and has "the most balanced audience."

It was a Hipster Runoff-style satire of menswear blogging written in a stream-of-consciousness poetic shorthand. It was scathing, smart, and mostly funny. It was also written anonymously, leading some sites to even offer bounties for the identity behind the blog, the writer of which even emerged at one point to speak with GQ’s website (in character, of course).

Last August, it was announced that Fuck Yeah Menswear had nabbed itself a blog-to-book deal.

Around November, Fuck Yeah Menswear filed its most recent post, and then went off the grid.

Maybe that's because they didn't want to give away their best stuff for free. After all, the book, according to Amazon.com, is due out in November. Or maybe it's simply because they didn't want to be outed.

Either way, the latter is now a moot point, as word of the blog's identity is beginning to leak out. The Observer has learned (as has The Trad) that the editors of the blog are none other than Lawrence Schlossman and Kevin Burrows.

"Yep, it's true," Mr. Schlossman confessed, speaking to The Observer by phone. "I wrote Fuck Yeah Menswear, but I don't do it by myself. My buddy Kevin Burrows, who lives in Los Angeles and works at Dreamworks Pictures does it with me."

"His name as well as mine will be on the book when it comes out this November. He deserves to have his name and work highlighted and acknowledged as much as I do, he's essential to this thing."

Mr. Schlossman is a whirlwind of talents and channels to funnel them through: He has a day job as an associate editor at Complex. He Tweets under the handle "Sartorially I.N.C." to hysterical effect (his running live Met Ball commentary was fantastic; his final note likened Florence Welch to an "endangered avian species").

He also handles the Tumblr known as How To Talk To Girls At Parties, and the blog Sartorially Inclined, and has done social media work for the Park and Bond Tumblr.

Mr. Schlossman was originally singled out as a suspect behind the blog by The Fader, along with Grantland's Chris Ryan (who, while he was once indeed a beloved anonyblogger did not make the cast of this one).

Mr. Schlossman was interviewed for the definitive (such as it is) Oral History of Menswear Blogging for GQ. He was quoted by the author Dave Greenwald on the subject of the then-anonymous Fuck Yeah Menswear:

I’ve always been of the belief that it’s definitely being run by a peer, there’s no doubt. You have dudes, and I know guys like this, I’ve become friendly with guys who know everything about the blogosphere but don’t blog, but there’s a threshold, like, oh my god, there’s no way, why would someone spend so much time learning every nuance of the community if he wasn’t participating? So whether Fuck Yeah Menswear was his way of saying, “Fuck it, I’m going to participate,” or some dude who has one foot in that world, I don’t know, but it’s someone who gets the subcultural—who knows the personalities and who knows the nuance of those personalities.

F.Y.M. then emailed Mr. Greenwald: "I’m not a blogger. Somebody lied."

"That's a riff on a Rick Ross rap lyric," Mr. Schlossman laughed. "We love to re-purpose rap lyrics, and make them work in the framework in which that personality exists. Anybody who'd read the blog would get that."

As for whether or not his employers knew of his side-project, they most definitely did: "Anyone who I've ever worked for is totally aware and supportive of the things I do on the side," he explained, "one of which is getting to write this book."

There is but one word with which to characterize the whirlwind success and inevitable outing that comes with an anonyblog like the one maintained by Mr. Schlossman and Mr. Burrows:

Crisp.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Jim Nelson, head juror

GQ editor Jim Nelson was the foreman on the jury that found Trevell Coleman—a.k.a. Bad Boy rapper G Dep—guilty of fatally shooting John Henkel last month.

"I did not want to do jury duty," Mr. Nelson wrote in his June letter from the editor. "I said a prayer to baby Jesus the night before, asking him to use his baby Jesus powers and to please Lord not let them pick me like they always do."

Not to impugn Mr. Nelson's judgment (the man picked our favorite magazine cover featuring iced coffee, after all), but it sounds like a cut-and-dried case. Mr. Coleman confessed to the almost 20-year-old cold case out of nowhere in 2010. He was 18 years old when a botched robbery led Mr. Coleman to shoot Mr. Henkel three times in East Harlem and flee on his bike. Seventeen years later, he walked into a Harlem precinct and waived his Miranda Rights, saying he wanted to tell the story and he needed to know whether the victim lived or died.

"I sometimes wondered if I was fit to judge this man who was capable of acts of public violence and personal honor I couldn't even imagine having to wrestle with," Mr. Nelson wrote. "And I'd think: Hasn't this man suffered enough? He's done twenty years in his head already. That's a slower, more infernal form of justice, the interior kind, isn't it?"

Mr. Coleman, who will be sentenced on Tuesday, faces at least 15 years. He told MTV he has "no ill thoughts towards anybody."

And we know just the magazine  for his jailhouse tell-all.

If they were giving out prizes for best ledes, the same issue of New York would be our top pick as well. Remember?

"The first time they had sex, during that initial exploration of unfamiliar flesh, John Ross uttered words to Ann Maloney that would sound to her like prophecy. 'You have the body of a young girl. You need a baby.'"

Chills!

Bloomberg Businessweek won the Business & Technology category for its last-minute Steve Jobs cover.  Two different Real Simple covers—both blown-up photographs of flowers—won the Health & Fitness and Women's Interest categories, while GQ's Mila Kunis with iced coffee cover won Men's Interest.

Many more accolades to come at tonight's Ellies.